Astral Codex Ten

RCP8.5

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RCP8.5

Article

RCP8.5 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 13, 2021 and November 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “RCP8.5 is the most-extreme scenario of RISING emissions”; “scenarios like RCP8.5 (>6C of warming)“. It most often appears alongside Trump, Aleksandar Vucic, Anatoly Karlin.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 13, 2021
  • Last seen: November 25, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
The linked page says instead, "In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5)."
The page THEY link to says instead that RCP8.5 is the most-extreme scenario of RISING emissions, not of emissions continuing as at present.
So the IPCC doesn't predict that sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter. RCP8.5 is an unlikely scenario. The consensus median sea rise by 2100, when I checked about 2 years ago, was about one foot. The only findings since then that I'm aware of would lower that to maybe 8 inches, but that's a guess with high variance, since the findings involved local effects such as the circulation of water underneath ice shelves, rather than global effects.
Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
29: EA Forum: Good News On Tackling Climate Change. Although we’re less likely than hoped to reach the target of < 1.5C of warming, we’re also less likely than feared to reach truly awful scenarios like RCP8.5 (>6C of warming). Partly this is just because, as we move forward in time and see how things go, uncertainty decreases and the chance of extreme scenarios goes down. Partly it’s because we’ve genuinely made progress in things like solar power (and, although we haven’t banned coal, we’ve mostly succeeded at not vastly increasing our coal use, which was never certain). And partly it’s because we’ve studied climatology more and ruled out some scenarios where the climate is super-hyper-sensitive to carbon. As a result, the authors’ interpretation of IPCC data says that the risk of RCP8.5 (the technical name for the worst warming scenario) has gone from 11% in 2015 to less than 1% today. We are probably on track for between 2 and 4 degrees of warming this century, which will be bad but not existentially catastrophic.
Inline links: Good News On Tackling Climate Change